Four important books for Meetings. Three new, one just reprinted in a new format.! {merchFetch tpl="merchStampsA.html" hasImage="1" isbn="1-937768-02-3,11-99-03387-1,0-9779511-4-6,1-888305-06-1,1-888305-06-1,0-9779511-4-6,11-99-03387-1" cache="20"}

Many meetings give a copy of “Quaker Way” to their Quaker young folks and attenders - and QuakerPress of FGC have just reprinted it in slightly larger format.

I think in future many meetings will want to give new members and certainly any potential committee members or officers a copy of “Quaker Process for Friends on the benches”, from Friends Journal. Three hundred and fifty plus pages of explanation and how to tips for Meeting life. And lastly the excellent introduction to the Quaker testimonies from AFSC, based on a document from San Francisco Friends School. ]]> tag:www.quakerbooks.org,2012://3.4789 2012-05-08T16:56:17Z 2012-05-09T15:12:49Z

See also our New Books, Faith and Play, Popular Pendle Hill Pamphlets and Secondhand and remainder flyers in the same clickable/readable format.
Click to launch the full Catalog in a new window New Books Flyer Faith and Play Flyer Pendle Hill Pamphlets Sale and Remainder list ]]> tag:www.quakerbooks.org,2011://3.4557 2011-12-13T19:10:49Z 2011-12-13T19:32:27Z

A few months ago Lucy Duncan introduced me as a new voice in the Book Musings newsletter. Now it is my pleasure to introduce my colleague, Jerimy Pedersen. Jerimy is a longtime staff of QuakerBooks. Among the many amazing things Jerimy does is drive the huge truck to the FGC Gathering every year bringing not only all the contents of the Gathering Store, but everything else needed to run this enormous event. He serves on the Friends General Conference staff diversity committee, helping us work toward clearer awareness and understanding of race issues. And he is the go-to person in our offices when what you need is a friendly face. He is also quite a reader and I very much trust his thoughtful recommendations! I hope you will enjoy his musings as much as I expect to! -- Chel

Hi, I’m Jerimy the second member of the new Book Musings team of Chel and Jerimy. As I begin, I’d like to remember Lucy Duncan, our onetime manager and now Friends Liaison for AFSC. I’m sure you are familiar with Lucy as Book Musings’ progenitor. I’d also like to appreciate Laird Holby, our eminent bookstore clerk, whose retirement is imminent. Both Lucy and Laird have given many years and much effort to QuakerBooks, and is each responsible to a great degree for its transformation from a sleepy, casual concern to a vigorous and relevant ministry. They are both dedicated and energetic Friends, and intelligent and sensitive people. We will miss these beautiful friends.

So enough about us! I want to tell you about two new books I’ve been reading. Both are just received from our friends at Quaker Books of London.

Geoffrey Durham was idled by London traffic when a Quaker peace banner caught his attention. He was interested enough to look up Friends in the phone book and to stop by the bookshop at the Friends Center. Perhaps he was even served by Graham Garner, our own QuakerBooks manager extraordinaire, who was working there at the time! He left with three publications and spent the afternoon reading in a nearby café. Among them was the Advices and Queries of Britain Yearly Meeting, which caught his attention with the exhortation, “Attend to what love requires of you.” This phrase became a touchstone of his experience over seventeen subsequent years among Friends. It is also the theme of his new short book, Being a Quaker: A Guide for Newcomers.

This is one of the most personable and readable introductions to Friends that I’ve seen. It is neither prescriptive nor pushy, but practical, humble, and full of friendly encouragement, intertwined with the author’s own narrative of how he came to a deep and challenging commitment to his meeting. Periodically the viewpoints of other Friends are included, offering a variety of voices to describe perceptions and experiences of Friends. The book is a publication of British Quaker Quest, an outreach program. At the start, the author makes something of a big deal about the book being about British Friends and British Friends only, but coming from the liberal unprogrammed tradition in the U.S., I found very little alien, other than some of the ordinary British perversions of our language.

I’m someone who until recently has given earth concerns only an indirect and tentative glance, not because I consider them unimportant or am suspicious of the science behind them, but because I’m afraid I may be unable to make a difference, I’m afraid our demise is a fait accompli and that we’re dragging the rest of creation with us, and I’m afraid of being overwhelmed and paralyzed by a sense of doom. So it was with foreboding that I began the 2011 Swarthmore Lecture Costing Not Less than Everything: Sustainability and Spirituality in Challenging Times by Pam Lunn. My tensions were relieved at the start of Chapter One by a reproduction of a NASA photograph showing the Earth rising over the moon. Hovering over the horizon of a solid, monochrome, and barren moon, the Earth seems so meek and lovely and vulnerable and tender with its colors and activity that whatever caring instincts I have were aroused and my heart softened. An intimacy is established. The author contends that we are already in crisis concerning the Earth and her resources. She wastes no time treating climate change as anything other than a fact, and begins quickly on what our role should be as a religious society and responsible citizens to intervene between our wasteful and destructive society and our Mother Earth. She recommends lifestyle options, political actions, and movements to support that relate to our testimonies in various ways. Particularly invigorating for me was a metaphor she draws on from a Marshall McLuhan quote, “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew". The reader is henceforth addressed as “crew” and it is all hands on deck. This she joins nicely with the belief held by most Friends that there is no distinction between the sacred and the secular, and that as Friends we have abolished the laity, not the priesthood. She is prescriptive and practical, and in the end hopeful and sure of us as a religious society and of our ability to answer these environmental, societal, and spiritual crises creatively and with integrity.

Yours truly,
Jerimy

Traveling requires books.

It’s not just about whiling away the long hours of a transcontinental flight or getting through the middle-of-the-night wakefulness that comes with a time shift. I’m often more selective about what I read when I’m on the road. I have never wanted to load my luggage with too many books, so I developed the habit of choosing carefully, sometimes saving books for weeks in anticipation of taking them on a trip. Even in these days of “weightless books,” travel is special time and I want to be companioned by a special book. Many titles are tangled in my memory with the trip I was taking when I read them: Anna Karenina in New Zealand, A Portrait in Grey in France, At Home on the long drive with my husband this summer to the FGC Gathering in Iowa.

But most of my travel is local. I spend two hours a day riding SEPTA’s R5 commuter line between my home in Chester County and the FGC offices in Philadelphia. There’s a lot to be said for more-or-less quiet, uninterrupted time at the beginning and end of every workday. But I could not face it on a regular basis without books.

These days, when I board the train, I am often carrying not a single book, but dozens and dozens of them, all downloaded into my bottom-of-the-line, two-pound ereader. I use a Nook. Other passengers use iPads, Kindles, Sony Readers, and other devices I don’t recognize.

Look around the train, and it’s obvious that ebooks are here to stay. Not everyone is happy about it, and there are all kinds of pros and cons. It’s true that you can mark passages and insert comments into your ebook, and you can bookmark the parts you want to come back to, but I miss the dog ears and marginalia of the “dead tree books” for which I am a second or third reader – I miss the traces of other readers who have gone before. Reading, like riding a train in which all the passengers are interacting with a device, is a more solitary activity than it used to be.

On the plus side, all of the books in my Nook are in large print – because I chose to configure them that way. And they are searchable. Where did we meet that character before? – I can find the page in seconds.

I bet you’ve guessed what I’m working up to! QuakerPress is now offering our most recent publications as ebooks, as well as in print. Over time, we expect to bring some of our older books into electronic format as well, but all three of our most recent titles, as well as an earlier one, can be downloaded for electronic readers. Some of these books are good ones for discussion groups or adult classes in meetings, and as I learned in my own book group, it’s always helpful when at least one person in the conversation has an electronic version. What was that really clever remark that Elizabeth made when Darcy snubbed her? It can be called up in half a minute!

Here are our ebooks. More to come!

NEW! Conversation with Christ: Quaker Meditations on the Gospel of John by Doug Gwyn. As someone who has always had a very mixed relationship with the Fourth Gospel (it’s beautiful, it’s deep, Jesus seems so obnoxious!), I am grateful for the way this book holds my hand through specific passages. In a format perfect for an ongoing discussion group or a meeting’s adult religious education class, Doug Gwyn takes 13 conversations out of John (“the Quaker gospel”) and explores closely what is happening in the immediate, mutually transforming encounters between Jesus and the woman of Samaria, Pilate, Simon Peter, and others. Each of these conversations is followed by “Reflections from the Quaker Tradition,” a section exploring the conversation’s themes from the perspective of Quaker history and witness. Finally, there is a guided meditation inviting us into our own “Conversation.”

NEW! A Lively Faith: Reflections on Iowa Yearly Meeting of Friends (Conservative) by Callie Marsh is a short, personal portrait of rural Friends from one of the three Conservative yearly meetings. Who are they? How are they connected to the Wilburite movement? In what ways are they similar to other Friends? In what ways are they unique? How are they addressing present-day challenges, such as same-gender marriage? This is interesting train reading.

NEW! Black Fire: African American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights is a collection that breaks easily into short chunks that work well for commuters and discussion groups alike. For the morning ride, I prefer something meditative, such as the spiritual essays of Jean Toomer or the poems of Howard Thurman. On the ride home, I want something lively to counteract the day’s fatigue: Bayard Rustin’s account of his nonviolent response to being removed by police from a bus in Tennessee or selections from Mahala Ashley Dickerson’s “Negro Lawyer in the South.” This anthology speaks to both ends of the day.

Where Should I Stand? A Field Guide for Monthly Meeting Clerks is a wise, practical handbook that we published three years ago. It was our first experiment with epublishing, and helped us decide that we should do more of it. Elizabeth Boardman discusses the many questions she asked herself in her first term as a meeting clerk, from how she should handle her relationships with visitors, committees, and “disappointed Friends” to “am I a Mary or a Martha?” If you are a clerk, think you may be one someday, or if there is a clerk in your life, this book is a helpful, Friendly companion.

NEW! Available not as an ebook, but as a pdf download, is the new creation from FGC’s Youth Ministries Program, Build It! A Toolkit for Nurturing Intergenerational Spiritual Community. This collection of resources was prepared to assist meetings and other Friends groups in nurturing community and connectedness between young and old. About half of the book is devoted to “tools” ― activities for deepening relationship, games for gathering, for learning about one another, and for a variety of other purposes. The chapters that comprise the other half of the book share the insights developed by committee and staff in their own experiences building communities of all generations. See more about it and get some sneak peeks over at www.fgcquaker.org/toolkit.

Also great for discussion groups – even if we only have them in paper:

The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Change―and When to Let Go, by Eileen Flanagan. The author of this book is one of my favorite Quaker writers. She delves into her own experience, listens to the experience of others, and writes authentically from what she has discovered. This book grapples with the mystery at the middle of the well-known Serenity Prayer, which asks God for the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference. How does one know the difference? There are no easy answers in this book, no self-help rubrics or step-by-step solutions. But there is insight about living into the dilemma and discerning the path forward. The book contains stories from people of many faiths and all walks of life, those who have learned to accept with serenity and those who have braved the fear of change.

The Evolution of Faith: How God is Creating a Better Christianity by Philip Gulley. Early in this book, the author describes carefully holding a stunned hummingbird in his open hand, waiting for it to recover enough to fly away. He writes

I've often thought revelations and insights about God ought to be handled much the same way, loosely and softly so as not to smother or harm them. Unfortunately, this is usually the opposite of how divine truths are held. Our tendency is to grab them tightly, seizing them, squeezing out their vibrancy and vitality until life is gone from them.

Philip Gulley, a Quaker pastor, explores his religion from a relaxed grasp. What is God like? Who was Jesus, really, and were there others like him? What aspects of religion are helpful to us and what aspects get in the way of a healthy spirituality? What about suffering? Death? Nothing is too sacred to hold in open hands and consider anew, based on experience and thought rather than on codified teachings. The twelve chapters each come with three discussion questions, any one of which could keep my meeting engaged for a morning.

May you dwell in the Light,
Chel

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Driving down the streets where the tornado had done the most damage, I felt as though time had stopped—the faces of many of the houses were gone and some were left standing like doll houses, with most of the furniture intact. A medical dictionary was found miles away; the tornado hadn’t respected the inscription, “Please do not take this volume out of this room.” My mom had a friend who had recently moved to Omaha and didn’t know about tornados. He was driving when the tornado hit and was unknowingly in the eye of the storm. He looked to his right and the post office was razed; he looked to his left and the drugstore crumpled. He kept right on driving, until at last he reached home. His wife ran out of the house to ask if he was okay. When he opened his mouth, his voice was three octaves higher than usual. He squeaked, “What is going on?”

I thought about this calamity when the tornadoes hit recently in Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Iowa, and many other states, as well as Turkey, New Zealand, and Greece. I’ve seen pictures of the enormous damage, heard about the lives lost, and prayed for the victims. It’s easy to ask the question, “What is going on?”

I remember when a gardener friend told me years ago that climate change would manifest as chaos. Volatility seems to be discernible in lots of ways, beyond the weather. The world seems to be cracked open, manifesting change, churning and uprooting all we’ve known before. The softer capitalism instituted with the New Deal and the Great Society programs has been eroded, and the middle class is endangered. The public school system is threatened and underfunded. The economic collapse of 2008 has resulted in greater disparity between the rich and the poor. Our tenuous societal constructions, the ways we’ve disconnected from one another and the earth, are being revealed, uncovered, broken open. There are many reasons for grief and despair. And right beside that grief, in this chaos, I believe, there is the real possibility of transformation. I also see abundant reasons for hope.

I see hope in the neighborhood association around the corner from where my family lives, which decided, instead of focusing on crime, to work with neighbors to clean up the park, make more space for children to play, and host potlucks and movies in the park regularly. This is a working class neighborhood in which 14 distinct languages are spoken. The potlucks are amazing.

I see hope in the number of bikes teeming in the city, ever more, taking space from the cars.

I see hope in the work of the Quaker Institute for the Future which is hosting discernment sessions and considering solutions that address the roots of some of our problems at the level of the economy.

I see hope in the work of Niyonu Spann and Beyond Diversity 101, in which true human connection can be rediscovered, and in which learning to perceive the way we co-create the systems in which we live can help us to create new ways of seeing/being that more fully manifest a loving humanity.

I see hope in the message of George Lakey’s Quakers and Social Class workshops—demonstrating that the roles and skills we learn in our respective classes can be transformed into tools for societal change, if we work together.

I see hope in the work of Los Angeles Central High School peace gardens, in which American Friends Service Committee staffers have partnered with high school students to create an edible and sustainable school community garden.

I see hope in the recent research on neuroplasticity, finding both that the brain can recover more substantially from injury than previously thought and that neural pathways can be restructured, indicating that our capacity for remapping our minds, for learning, remains enormous even after childhood. I see hope in so many places.

Several years ago I read The Spell of the Sensuous: Language and Perception in a More Than Human World by David Abram. In it there is a seminal story which illuminates both the huge challenges and the potential for healing that exist. Abram spends quite a bit of time in the wilderness, wandering. On one occasion he passes the night in a cave and wakes to a spider weaving a web in the light of the rising sun in the cave’s entrance. He watches intently, unaware of time, feeling completely engaged and a part of the experience he is watching. He experiences himself as not separate from the spider, the web, the cave, or the air. Later he returns to Seattle with a commitment to retain his spiritual and natural awareness, but he finds that the human constructions against which he bumps—tall buildings, machines, roads—obstruct his sensorial experience; they literally get in the way of his capacity to retain his connection with the earth. The thesis of his book is that symbolic language has disrupted human experience and connection to the earth and animals, that the abstraction of language and our own inventions has disturbed our experience of ourselves as part of a more than human landscape. His solution is to practice a speech and language, a storytelling and spiritual presence, rooted in the land:

The practice of realignment with reality can hardly afford to be utopian. It cannot base itself upon a vision hatched in our heads and then projected into the future. Any approach to current problems that aims us toward a mentally envisioned future implicitly holds us within the oblivion of linear time. It holds us, that is, within the same illusory dimension that enabled us to neglect and finally to forget the land around us. By projecting the solution somewhere outside of the perceivable present, it invites our attention away from the sensuous surroundings, induces us to dull our senses, yet again, on behalf of a mental ideal.

A genuinely ecological approach does not work to attain a mentally envisioned future, but strives to enter, ever more deeply, into the sensorial present. It strives to become ever more awake to the other lives, the other forms of sentience and sensibility that surround us in the open field of the present moment. For the other animals and the gathering clouds do not exist in linear time. We meet them only when the thrust of historical time begins to open itself outward, when we walk out of our heads into the cycling life of the land around us.

This, too, gives me hope. The chaos around us is an invitation to awaken, to find connection and grounding in the landscape and with our neighbors, to reconnect ourselves to the soil on which we walk, and to rediscover the practice of the presence of God in the glint of a stranger’s eye, in a hydrangea in the backyard, in the bee’s flight.

I hope this message finds you both shaken and awakened during this tumultuous time, ready to live as if our lives were prayers calling us to be fully human, to be tender and broken, eager for healing.

Lucy leaves FGC, takes a position at AFSC: 10% Off 'Good-bye' Sale

This is my last Book Musings. After more than twelve years, I have decided to move on to other work—I’m excited to say I will be working as the Friends Liaison at the American Friends Service Committee as of August 1st. I will miss FGC and the Friends with whom I’ve gotten to work, but you can find me soon blogging on AFSC’s website, and I will be traveling among Friends, and hope our paths will cross. I especially wish Barry Crossno, FGC's new General Secretary well in his tenure - he has many practical and spiritual gifts to give to FGC and I look forward to watching the organization thrive under his leadership. I leave the work I've carried in good hands: Chel Avery and Jerimy Pedersen will be writing Book Musings on alternate months, and other fine folks will be taking up my other work.

It’s been a wonderful twelve years, full of challenges and grace. Thank you for reading these occasional writings, and for being supportive of the bookstore. Without you, QuakerPress and QuakerBooks would not be possible. Please continue to support the bookstore and the ministry of the written word that offers a uniquely Quaker perspective.

As a way to say “good-bye,” all items at the QuakerBooks website are 10% off from today until next Tuesday, the 26th.

Plenary recordings from this year’s FGC Gathering available as mp3s

All three recordings from this year’s FGC Gathering plenary addresses are now available at QuakerBooks.org as downloadable mp3s for $5.00 each (10% off through July 26th at midnight). Hear samples of all the talks on FGC's SoundCloud page, or click one of these links to purchase from QuakerBooks:

To Go Where There Is No Light
by John Calvi

On Food Justice
by LaDonna Redmond

Meeting at the Center
by Bruce Birchard

The first time I attended the yearly meeting sessions I noticed that the clerks and elders of the yearly meeting tended to be in their positions for a long time, but newcomers were enthusiastically invited to participate and lovingly introduced to the practices of the yearly meeting. The body seemed to hold their corporate practices with discipline and joy. The meetings for worship with attention to business were riveting to me, an opportunity to watch the Spirit move and the body serving as an open vessel to that Spirit. Not long into my tenure within the yearly meeting I volunteered to serve on a committee to wrestle with and possibly propose a same sex marriage minute. I was in love with a woman at the time, so for me the concern was deeply personal. The committee met often for sessions in which we educated one another, considered the language, and worshiped. After a year, we had each been transformed by the process, understood ourselves differently, and carried a minute to the yearly meeting with expectation and excitement – how could the yearly meeting not see the wisdom of our work?

There was palpable energy at that year’s session – rainbow buttons were everywhere, and it felt as though the support of the minute was strong, clear. When the minute was read on the floor of the meeting, two people stood in the way, however. One showed up after six years of absence just to stand in the way of this minute. If it had been only his voice in opposition, the minute would have been approved. The other person, though, was an engaged and respected member of the community, and the body wasn’t clear to move forward. It was painful, difficult – at least one lesbian couple left the yearly meeting and, as far as I know, never returned. But the small group that had brought the minute realized that we had undergone a process into which we had not invited the body, and that all the meetings needed to be invited to engage in the questions we had held and with which we had wrestled. So the minute went to each monthly meeting, and meetings considered the questions posed by the minute. At the following year’s sessions, the same exact minute was brought back to the floor. After the minute was read, there was a hush, and without comment, the minute was approved.

I learned a lot in that year about faithfulness and the mystery of love. The lessons of that process have stayed with me when I get frustrated or impatient as Friends struggle. This year the FGC Gathering will be in Iowa, at the invitation of Iowa Yearly Meeting (C). I'm excited to come home to IYM(C) Friends and to the lovely rolling hills and wildflowers of Iowa, where, though threatened by opposition, same sex marriage is legal.

This year, we will be releasing a new book about Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) by Callie Marsh, A Lively Faith: Reflections on Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative). She’ll be reading from and discussing her book on Monday, July 4, at 4:30 p.m. Callie joins a number of authors in a program of Gathering Store events in which Friends get to engage with and explore well considered examinations of Quaker faith and practice, as well as explorations of issues addressed by Quaker authors that stretch beyond the walls of the meetinghouse. This program has grown in the last ten years to be one of the most well attended and well appreciated activities of the FGC Gathering. See a listing of more Author Events below.

You can hear Doug Gwyn reading meditations from the chapters of this book on SoundCloud (free) by clicking here

In Faith,

Lucy

Conversations with Christ by Doug Gwyn

QuakerPress of FGC is about to launch Conversation with Christ: Quaker Meditations on the Gospel of John by Doug Gwyn.

The Gospel of John is sometimes known among Friends as "the Quaker Gospel," because it speaks to the Quaker concern for a here-and-now experience of eternal reality in Christ. Conversation with Christ expores this theme through thirteen conversations from the Fourth Gospel in which the history and mystery of Jesus are revealed. Each of these close readings is followed by examples of ways Quakers have grappled with its message and by a guided meditation inviting readers to experience the form Christ takes in our lives. Pre-order Conversation with Christ at 20% off through midnight on Tuesday, May 31st.

This granddaughter described Margaret discovering Lucretia Mott’s grave at Fair Hill Burial Ground in north Philadelphia, which at the time was overgrown, neglected, surrounded by a neighborhood also terribly neglected and abandoned. I can imagine Margaret discovering Lucretia’s grave on that day in 1992 – finding the small gravestone among the trash and debris, brushing it off, picking up the trash, clearing the space to reveal the lettering. That day was the beginning of the transformation of that burial ground to become a place of witness and love – for the lives of those interred there, the lives of the Quakers tending the graves, and for the neighbors living close. That day began a relationship that continues to this day, one of mutual spiritual irradiation and a witness to the power of love. Margaret’s life seemed dedicated to that work – of bringing to light the lives of Friends who were beacons for the Society of Friends, and by doing so, calling us back to our center, to live from that same place of love and witness, of a willingness to go to unfamiliar, uncomfortable places, and to seek out love and connection.

Bruce Birchard, General Secretary of FGC, was a good friend of Margaret and her husband, Allen. He had care of the memorial meeting for worship, and he told a story about Margaret’s indomitable spirit:

"I served with Margaret Bacon on what is now called Membership Care Committee for Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting. Our meeting was one of the early ones to seriously consider the possibility of marrying same gender couples under our care. After several years of discernment, the meeting finally found unity in a decision to hold “ceremonies of commitment” for same gender couples, but not marriage ceremonies. Although we had several same-gender couples in our meeting, however, not one of them approached the meeting about having a “ceremony of commitment.” After a year or two of no action, someone (and it may have been Margaret) brought the matter up again in our committee. We had a strong sense that our work was not done. Shouldn’t we bring the matter back to the meeting for further discernment? One member of the committee—a lesbian woman—said, “I don’t know if we should do this. I’m not optimistic about the ability of our meeting to move further on this matter.” Margaret spoke at that point: “This is not about being optimistic or pessimistic. This is about being faithful. I understand the fears we have, and I know it will be hard and challenging work. But I have faith that this meeting can come to unity to marry same-gender couples.” It took another year and a half, but we did come to that unity, and it was a supremely joyous day when we found ourselves clear on that decision."

As Fair Hill has no more space to bury Quakers, Margaret was buried at another Quaker burial ground, Friends Southwestern Burial Ground in Upper Darby, the place where my husband serves as caretaker and we live in the caretaker’s house. Now her grave will serve as a constant reminder to me and others to live my life courageously, grounded in faith.

At the end of Valiant Friend, Margaret describes her experience standing next to Lucretia’s grave that day, “The grass stirs, the children shout. Otherwise there is nothing, only that clear light that she loved pouring down upon me. Only the memory, out of the silence, of the many, many times she said it: the Light is as available today as it was yesterday as it has been everywhere, for all eternity. Only after a bit, a gentle nudging. ‘What is thee doing about it?’ Lucretia wants to know.”

Margaret wants to know.

In tribute to Margaret, we are offering 15% off any book listed here that she wrote. Please take some time to peruse her works, a wonderful collection which illuminates the lives of Friends.

Find all of Margaret's in print books at her author's page at QuakerBooks.

In Peace,
Lucy

Here is an interview conducted with Margaret by Angelina Conti in 2008. Here is Margaret’s obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Margaret gave FGC many of her old books, you can find some of them here.

New Got Silence? T-Shirts Available

Awhile ago there was a discussion on Facebook about organizing a Quaker flash mob. People would gather at Penn Station or 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, get some wonderful Quaker singers to belt out “Teach Me to Stop and Listen” or “Spirit of the Living God” then a whole bunch of Quakers would emerge wearing Got Silence? T-shirts and create a huge public meeting for worship.

This conversation on Facebook inspired the t-shirts we just produced, which have the new FGC ‘Seed’ logo on the front and “Got Silence? www.quakerfinder.org” on the back. They are available in v-neck, men’s traditional or women’s tiny sized shirts in a dark teal blue or cranberry red. We think they look great!

Pre-Order Parker Palmer's New Book

Parker Palmer will publish a new book in early August, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics worthy of the Human Spirit. In his newest book, Parker J. Palmer builds on his own extensive experience as a an inner life explorer and social change activist to examine the personal and social infrastructure of American politics. What he did for educators in The Courage to Teach he does here for citizens by looking at the dynamics of our inner lives for clues to reclaiming our civic well-being. In Healing the Heart of Democracy, he points the way to a politics rooted in the commonwealth of compassion and creativity still found among “We the People.”

“Democracy,” writes Palmer, “is a non-stop experiment in the strengths and weaknesses of our political institutions, local communities, and the human heart—and its outcome can never be taken for granted. The experiment is endless, unless we blow up the lab, and the explosives to do the job are found within us. But so also is the heart’s alchemy that can turn suffering into compassion, conflict into community, and tension into energy for creativity amid democracy’s demands.”

Healing the Heart of Democracy names the “habits of the heart” we need to revitalize our politics and shows how they can be formed in the everyday venues of our lives. Palmer proposes practical and hopeful methods to hold the tensions of our differences in a manner that can help us restore a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

You can pre-order the book from QuakerBooks for a 10% pre-publication price through August 15th, 2011.

Read an interview that Chel Avery pulled together with Parker Palmer a couple years ago.

Chel Avery has served FGC for the past six months as Publications Manager. She understands editing as a ministry which assists authors in clarifying their message. She’s edited Pendle Hill pamphlets for several years and used to serve as director of the Quaker Information Center, for which she established an enewsletter ‘’Flashes of Light.”

I’m grateful that she has accepted my invitation to write Book Musings on alternate months – you will find that her reflections on books and Quaker spirituality are engaging and insightful, her voice is an excellent companion in this ministry of finding and promoting Quaker writings.

In Peace,
Lucy

Book Musings: Buried Treasures brought to Light

Hello! This a new voice to Book Musings. I am Chel Avery, serving for the past several months as Publications Manager at Friends General Conference. Lucy Duncan has invited me to write Book Musings on the months when she does not. And this is an exciting time for me to begin. Sunday, we launched our newest publication, Black Fire: African American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights, at Friends Center in Philadelphia. A standing-room-only crowd heard editors Hal Weaver and Paul Kriese and others read from this anthology of works by three centuries of African American Friends.

What buried treasures were brought to light! One of the highlights was Amanda Kemp’s dramatic reading from the “Memoirs and Anecdotes of William Boen,” who was enslaved when he had his first spiritual openings and found himself in the difficult position of having to choose between the different instructions of his New Master and his old master. I asked one of the editors what he considered the most regrettably forgotten voices in this book, and he named Mahala Ashley Dickerson and George Sawyer, both lawyers during the civil rights era, both members of Friends meetings, and both sometimes injured by the complacency of white Friends who suggested that their good fortune to be in a Quaker community should stop them from raising issues of inequality that they encountered among Friends. A voice that is better remembered is that of Jean Toomer, a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance. But few people know him as a Quaker. He wrote some deeply moving pieces on the inner life of the spirit.

Bayard Rustin’s voice within Friends was “buried” in a more disturbing way. As co-author of the influential AFSC treatise “Speak Truth to Power,” published in 1955, his name was removed from the publication to protect the message from being associated with a recent scandal of homosexuality, in which Rustin, a gay man, had been arrested on a morals charge in California. AFSC’s board has recently taken action to restore his name to that important publication, which he played a key role in composing. Its opening passages are included in this anthology.

This experience has started me thinking about the other ways that voices and books are “buried treasures.” I remember going through an old box of “stuff” – one of those boxes that gets moved three times without unpacking – and finding an audiotape with my grandmother’s voice on it. Just a few sentences, but as recognizable and as beloved as it was the last time I heard it in life, over twenty years ago. A few years ago I did a secondhand book search and bought a copy of my old “cow book” (formally known as The Better Homes and Garden Story Book) that was the source of most bedtime reading when I was very young. The battered yellow volume sits on a shelf now, but I can recognize it from across the room and I treasure having it near.

Something has happened in the world of books. So many treasures get buried so quickly. Shelf life in public view is very short. Many years ago, I used to wait to buy a new book until I was ready to start reading it. I trusted that in six months, or two years, it would still be available. Now I am more likely to snap up something I want in a hurry, fearing that if I don’t get it now, it will disappear. It means a much larger shelf (confession: a shelf and a half) of yet-to-read titles, but books are precious in my life – I don’t want to let the good ones be strangers, seen on the far side of a room, but never met.

QuakerPress of FGC has a number of titles that are in danger of becoming buried treasures. When they first came out, we told the world about them. But now, if you don’t look for them, you may not know they are there. Here are a few of my favorites from recent years.

Where Should I Stand: A Field Guide for Monthly Meeting Clerks by Elizabeth Boardman. A friend of my family, a folk musician, once said of a certain Bob Dylan song, “The first time I heard it, I wanted to bite myself on the arm because I wasn’t the one who wrote it.” I don’t pretend to have the wisdom to have written this book, but as a sometimes clerk of my meeting, I could bite myself on the arm for not having better understood clerking from this author’s perspective. Elizabeth Boardman recognizes that being a clerk is so much more than a set practical functions that you perform on behalf of a meeting – it is a role you assume in relationship to a meeting and the people in it, a role that needs to be followed with careful discernment: a bit parent, a bit servant, a bit teacher, a bit student, a bit companion, a bit caregiver . . . and much more. Some of the questions weighed by the author and others she interviewed about their clerkship were: How should I relate to the children of the meeting? How will my personal life fit in with my role as clerk? How do I get support for this work? Do I have to attend worship every week and business meeting every month? Am I the hostess now? The practical functions of clerking are addressed as well, but this book speaks to so much more than the clerk’s “job description.” (This book is now available as a downloadable ebook at quakerbooks.org.)

Friend: The Story of George Fox and the Quakers. This is a book for children (10 and up) by the prolific fiction writer, Jane Yolen. What makes this treasure “buried” is its status as a children’s book, masking its wonderful value to adults like me. What a relief it was, after years of plowing through George Fox’s journal and countless other versions of early Quaker escapades, finally to read an account that explains the political and social contexts of those times in basic, simple terms that don’t presume I remember any more than I actually do from my 10th grade history class! (Am I really supposed to remember whose side the roundheads were on?) I think of this book as “George Fox for Dummies” – in a very good way.

Have you ever wondered what John Woolman actually said to the slave owners he visited? I have often wanted to be a fly on the wall, hearing the words he used to protest enslavers’ very way of life in tones of compassion and goodwill. Well, examples are available in the letters of Woolman’s likeminded contemporary, David Ferris. Resistance and Obedience to God, edited by Martha Paxson Grundy, is the title of Ferris’s short memoir, which will be delicious to anyone who finds inspiration in the Journal of John Woolman and wants more. I was especially delighted by the passage in which Ferris describes meeting the woman who was to become his wife. After having backed off from courting an attractive prospect at his own initiative, because he had not consulted his Guide, Ferris finds himself sometime later dining at a friend’s house where he meets a young woman. “My attention . . . being otherwise engaged, I took very little notice of her; but a language, very quietly and very pleasantly, passed through my mind on this wise, ‘If thou wilt marry that young woman, thou wilt be happy with her.’ There was such a degree of divine virtue attending the intimation, that it removed all doubt concerning its origin and Author.” Later, however, when the guests rise from the table, Ferris notices that she is lame. He is annoyed that this is what heaven has allotted to him, and thinks he would much rather choose for himself. He wrestles with the matter for many months before he accepts the guidance, and later writes that he has always “regarded our union as a proof of divine kindness.” What a concept of obedience!

Here is how another of my buried treasures begins:

Help Wanted: Person with deep spiritual life, infinite patience, great wisdom, and vast knowledge of the foibles of human nature. Job requires availability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to accompany friends and neighbors through the messes and joys that life provides. This is the job description for a member of the committee that in different meetings bears such names as counsel, oversight, nurture, or care. Yikes! Who can do this job? Grounded in God: Care and Nurture in Friends Meeting, edited by Patricia McBee, assembles articles previously published in the very thoughtful Pastoral Care Newsletter, sorted under such headings as Membership, Marriage and Divorce, Illness and Death, Conflict in the Meeting, Care for Persons with Mental Illness, and more. It’s the sort of book you dip into as needed, rather than reading cover to cover. The situations addressed may or may not perfectly correspond to the unique situation you are trying to navigate, but the combined wisdom, good sense, spiritual depth, and the wealth of practical advice are always helpful and frequently offer a broader perspective on an issue than the one we first take in.

My next buried treasure is one that isn’t buried very deeply, but has become a bit dusty, and I hope it will come to light often over the years. Lloyd Lee Wilson’s is my nomination for the Quaker classic of our time. Wilson goes deeply (and readably) into the meaning of our traditional Quaker beliefs and practices as modern Friends. Here are the conclusions of someone who is not merely well informed about those traditions, but who has explored them extensively in his own life and has wisdom to offer from experience and reflection. For example, in one chapter he details insights gleaned in his role as a public Friend about the risks of ministry . A few of them are: embarrassment, failure, change, vulnerability, scorn, and success. Other chapters explore worship, business meeting, testimonies, leadings and discernment, and more. Here is not only wisdom, but a vision of what we could become, as meetings and individuals, if we let our faith and commitment lead the way.

A second book, Wrestling with Our Faith Tradition, contains the transcripts of ten lectures Wilson gave at yearly meetings and other assemblies of Friends after the publication of the first book. My favorite is “How to Be a Non-Egyptian in the Land of Pharaoh.” One of the gifts I derived from these two books is that their clarity and consistency made it possible for me to identify not only where I agree, but where I do not agree, what basic assumptions can I not accept? For example, Wilson is so certain that God does not ever change that I was forced to recognize that I do not share that certainty. Why should God not change? I feel as much edified by my disagreements as I do by the many ways his books deepen and clarify my understanding, and call me to be a more dedicated Friend.

Writing all of this has left me curious about other people’s buried treasures in the world of books. If you have titles of your own to recommend, please write. I would love to do a follow-up Book Musings sometime on readers’ nominations for the title “Buried Treasure.”

In peace,
Chel Avery

Sometimes we would climb the roofs of the dorms and watch storms roll in. The storms were incredible to watch, huge cloud formations racing across the sky, you could see the sheets of rain falling long before the clouds reached us. During a storm, there was often quite a show in the sky, rainbows to the west, gray clouds to the east, sky and sun breaking through spongy clouds in some other direction. Sometimes I would go up on the roof by myself towards twilight. I would watch as the lights were turned on in the dorms and the houses nearby. I loved thinking of those lights as souls and would imagine the stories behind each light, the lives lived in each place. It was comforting to me – all the light and wisdom, happiness and sorrow through each window. I would wonder which souls I would encounter in my life, which thresholds I would be invited to cross, and by doing so, what I might discover.

Though there is no substitute for being there, for a handshake or for looking into the glint in another’s eye, books have definitely expanded the thresholds and lives into which I’ve been able to walk and learn. All of the books listed here today offer that opportunity.

I hope sometime soon you are invited in to a new space or a familiar one, for a cup of tea or a bit of wisdom.

Black Fire: New QuakerPress of FGC Book

On Sunday, March 6th, QuakerPress of FGC will celebrate the release of Black Fire: African American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights with a 2:30 p.m. launching party at Friends Center in Philadelphia. Hal Weaver and Paul Kriese (two of the book’s three editors, along with Stephen Angell) will be present to talk about their seven-year labor of love and argument in selecting from three centuries of writings by African American Friends, as well as some who traveled closely with Friends, participating in our worship and community. Please come to meet Hal and Paul, ask your questions, and get your book signed.

These selections offer a window into the breadth of wisdom, insight, and challenge that African Americans have brought to Quakers and to the larger world through their involvement with Friends. Writings range from the deeply spiritual guidance for meeting for worship, written by Jean Toomer, to the Civil Rights era challenges to Friends by George Sawyer, to the poetry of Howard Thurman and Helen Morgan Brooks, to the stories of nonviolent witness at work by Bayard Rustin. In all, eighteen amazing voices are included in this anthology. We think it makes an excellent follow up and companion book for our earlier publication, Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans and the Myth of Racial Justice by Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye.

Other New Books & Winter Sale

I’ve been reading, savoring really, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. It’s beautifully written and tells the larger societal story of the largest human migration in North America through both smaller, potent stories from over 1000 interviews Wilkerson conducted, and through the rich, dense story of three particular people. It gives both a sense of the excruciating circumstances that inspired the movement, as well as what challenges and promise was found at the end of the train and car rides north and west.

There are many stories in the book that have stuck with me, worked on me. One is the story of Robert Foster (nee Pershing), a doctor, who visits the clothing store in Monroe, Louisiana before his move. The white storekeeper has known him since he was a little boy. He notices his army uniform and asks Pershing what he will do when he gets out of the army. Pershing tells him he plans to go to California to set up a private practice. The man looks at him and asks:

“’What’s wrong with St. Francis?’ Pershing shook his head. The man had lived there since before Pershing was born, and a central fact of colored people’s existence hadn’t registered after all these years. ‘You know that colored surgeons can’t operate at St. Francis, Mr. Massur.’ Mr. Massur had meant well. Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.”

I saw Marty Grundy, a seasoned Friend and former clerk of the Traveling Ministries Committee, in Chicago at a retreat and she heartily recommended a recent book, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker. It sounds as though this book is an incredibly Quaker-sympathetic examination of early Christianity.

“Brock and Parker begin their research perplexed by a riddle: Why are images of the crucified Christ absent from early Christian art? After visiting Mediterranean and European sites sacred to early Christians, Brock and Parker formulate a provocative answer: the dying Christ never appears in early Christian art because early Christians did not believe Christ’s redemptive death had opened a heavenly afterlife for the faithful. Rather, Brock and Parker assert, early Christians looked to Jesus as the exemplar who showed how to defy injustice by creating paradise on Earth in a loving community. In this theory, images of Christ’s passion and death invaded Christian art only when the Church started using a theology of otherworldly salvation to recruit the forces necessary to build a Christian empire.” – Booklist

Tom Hamm’s long awaited book, Quaker Writings: An Anthology, 1650-1920 was just released. When I first heard Hamm talk about this book at a QUIP (Quakers Uniting in Publishing) conference, he talked a bit about how the history of Quaker faith is the history of publishing and this book testifies to that fact. This anthology offers both breadth and depth in one volume, mining journals, tracts, books of discipline, and many other less frequently cited sources to gather together a vivid picture of Quaker thought and history.

Covering nearly three centuries of religious development, this comprehensive anthology brings together writings that illustrate the development of Quakerism, show the nature of Quaker spiritual life, discuss Quaker contributions to European and American civilization, and introduce the diverse community of Friends. It gives a balanced overview of Quaker history, spanning the globe from its origins to missionary work, and explores daily life, beliefs, perspectives, movements within the community, and activism throughout the world.

Amazon.com? Some Reflections

Recently a f/Friend passed along feedback that a customer had purchased a book from us, despite the fact they could have purchased it at a much lower price from Amazon.com. Though I tend to resist offering a perspective on Amazon and think it’s best for us to engage our customer base by offering excellent service and selection, I did offer the below response, which I want to share more widely.

“Thanks again for this feedback and finding a way to give it to us, and thank you for supporting us despite price. I would add that it’s very hard to compete with Amazon on price, as many of the items they sell are predatorily priced, i.e. they are losing money on the sale so as to push others like us out of business. That’s hard for many Friends who prioritize price. What many don’t know is that Amazon doesn’t carry many of the titles we carry – QuakerPress, Pendle Hill books and pamphlets, small Quaker publishers, Britain Yearly Meeting titles and many others - many perceive Amazon as a comprehensive bookstore, but it’s really not true – and these titles either aren’t available at Amazon or they are much more expensive at Amazon.

Amazon doesn’t carry any of the eBooks, curricula, or mp3s we carry, or many of the used Quaker books we sell. Many items that we carry are most readily available through us – without us they would likely disappear. We do sell some books through Amazon, but need to mark them up to cover Amazon’s fees. We could employ people in ways counter to our values – fire those we currently have in positions or cut their benefits (we pay health care and vacation, very unusual in the book world, but in concert with Quaker values) and that would make it easier to offer discounts. We don’t think competing on price alone (though we do when we can – we offer 10% off on many hard covers, for example) will work well, but we try to make up for this by offering service and selection very much focused on our Quaker audience.

We also hope and intend to improve our website so as to become more of a portal for conversation and dialogue among Friends in the coming year, and to offer many more eBooks and items that are exclusive to us. Bookselling and publishing are hard especially now, but we believe it’s vital to our Society that we continue to disseminate and publish ideas that are in our own voice, vetted by us. We don’t think others can fill the void that closing our bookstore (or press) would open.”